| Anthony Hopkins |
Anthony Hopkins
Sir Anthony Hopkins is a multiple award winning Welsh actor well known for his roles in films like Shadowlands, The Remains of the Day and The Silence of the Lambs. He has also enjoyed a distinguished theatrical career and is renowned as a philanthropist.
Philip Anthony Hopkins was born on December 31st, 1937, in the village of Margam, near Port Talbot, in Wales. His father, Richard Arthur Hopkins, was a local character known for his temper. His mother, Muriel Yeats, was a relative of the poet William Butler Yeats. His paternal grandfather, a successful businessman and trade union activist, was also highly influential in his early life. Hopkins struggled at school, finding it hard to work because of his dyslexia, though he had a clear artistic talent, enjoying drawing, painting and playing the piano. After being moved several times in an attempt to teach him discipline, he ended up leaving Cowbridge Grammar School with just a single O-level. He had, however, already developed an interest in acting (his bedroom window faced a cinema, and at the age of fifteen he briefly met his idol, Richard Burton). He decided to learn the craft from the local YMCA players and subsequently enrolled in the Cardiff College of Music and Drama, graduating in 1957. He took a job with the local Arts Council but was then called up for National Service, during which he spent most of his time at a typewriter. When he came out of the army in 1960, he trained at RADA and began working in repertory theatre.
Hopkins' big break came in 1965 when he was spotted by Sir Laurence Olivier, who invited him to join the National Theatre. Hopkins worked as Olivier's understudy in August Strindberg's The Dance of Death and got the part himself when Olivier became ill with appendicitis. This led to a string of acclaimed theatre performances, but Hopkins soon grew bored of the repetitive nature of theatre work and began to take a renewed interest in film. He got his first film role in Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus and had his first hit two years later with The Lion in Winter, alongside Peter O'Toole and Katherine Hepburn. Though he continues to do some theatre work, his main focus has been on films ever since. He has specialised in depicting real life characters such as CS Lewis, Richard Nixon and Pablo Picasso, but the role which made him most famous, and for which he won his Oscar, was that of Hannibal Lecter in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, opposite Jodie Foster. He also received Oscar nominations for his work in Amistad (with Morgan Freeman and Nigel Hawthorne), Nixon (with Joan Allen and Bob Hoskins) and The Remains of the Day (with Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant and Christopher Reeve). He has won several BAFTAs, including a special award for Excellence in Film, and has received the Golden Globes' Cecil B DeMille Award for lifetime achievement. Queen Elizabeth II made him a Commander of the British Empire in 1987 and knighted him in 1993.
Hopkins' personal life has been similarly dramatic. His alcoholism led to the break-up of his first two marriages, to Petronella Barker (who appeared in Fatherland with Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson) and Jennifer Lynton. In 1975 he gave up drinking, and he has remained sober ever since, working to support substance abuse charities such as Women in Recovery. He is now married to Stella Arroyave, who appeared with him and Nicole Kidman in The Human Stain. His daughter by his first marriage is the actress Abigail Hopkins, with whom he is now on good terms, though they didn't speak for many years.
Hopkins became a naturalised American citizen in 2000; he now has dual citizenship. He lives in Santa Monica, California, where he is a volunteer teacher at the Ruskins School of Acting, but he maintains his commitment to Wales and is president of the National Trust's Snowdonia Appeal, to which he has personally donated a million pounds. |
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